Buying Oil Stocks Takes Bravery

This column was originally published on RealMoney on June 14 at 10:15 a.m. EDT. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

The right price for oil's a tough call. Crude oil inventories are the highest in 20 years. OPEC is pumping a ton to make up the difference. Oil prices at the pump should be coming down. Consumption is being hurt by high prices. Natural gas is way down and could go lower.

But I have to tell you, I think that this market is one that will not go to where it should go. It won't go there because while storage is high -- thank you, Internal Energy Agency, for those figures -- I continue to believe that storage is the wrong indicator.

We are still in a world where there are numerous groups trying to take down the oil supply. They are not going to stop. Plus we still have China wanting to buy oil whenever it can. And we can't switch to natural gas as quickly as we should, nor do we want to. Hurricane season matters, too.

That's why I can't back away from the notion that oil can go to the mid-$50s. That makes companies that sell at $45-$50 a buy, perhaps because they have too much natural gas, and I am thinking here of ConocoPhillips(COP - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) because it bought Burlington, a big nat gas play.

I like to position myself to buy low and sell higher. I can't get over the discount that oil stocks and service names are selling for, as opposed to the copper, coal, aluminum, steel and iron names. The latter five are all in long supply; they just have short-term problems and bottlenecks and pollution problems.

That's not the case with oil. It happens to be in long supply now and short supply later. That's the big difference. We are discounting all commodity plays equally. To lump them all in together when oil hasn't even come down yet and could go up with any geopolitical or weather event just isn't reflected in the price of many oil and oil services stocks now.

Oh, and it is true that we are brimming with nat gas in this country. But has anyone noticed that there isn't a lot of storage space for nat gas to begin with? Storage may be full, but how much storage is there?

It is so easy to sell down everything. Doesn't take a lot of bravery to do so.

It takes bravery to get up there and buy Nabors(NBR - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) or Halliburton(HAL - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) or Conoco or Chevron(CVX - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr).

Always opt for bravery at the turn. Never opt for cowardice.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Nabors.